A guide to developing a digital marketing strategy for your Industrial business

Every good marketing strategy starts with research. This is even more relevant for the industrial sector, where searches for your products or services might be slim. With so many different marketing avenues online, it’s important to choose the one that works for you, where your potential market is. This guide will help you find this avenue, and how to develop it for business growth.

Business goals

First things first, you need to establish your business goals. What do you want to get out of your marketing? Do you need to just get your brand out there in front of as many people are possible, or are you trying to sell one particular product? This can often be categorised into;

Brand Awareness

Lead Generation

Website Traffic

Engagement

Customer Retention

With a clear focus for your industrial business marketing, it’ll make it much easier to achieve it.

Google Analytics

Next, you’ll need Google Analytics. If you don’t have this already, please make the necessary steps to add this to your site right now. Analytics provides invaluable data about how your current site visitors are interacting with your website and how they found your website in the first place, which is enough in itself to develop a coherent marketing strategy (but please don’t just do this).

To add Analytics to your website, you need to create an account where you’ll be presented with a snippet of code. Add this to every page of your website, and watch the data come in! Make sure you set up filters to remove your IP address from the data, or you’ll see skewed results. It’s also worth ensuring you select industrial for the business sector section and sign up to Google newsletters for the latest news and tailored advice.

How to interpret Google Analytics data

It’s all well and good having Google Analytics on your website, but if you don’t understand the data, it’s pointless. Head to the Acquisition section to see how users found your website in the first place. It’ll be split into Organic, Paid, None (Direct), Social, Email and Referral traffic. From here, you can see if a backlink on a leading industrial website is bringing in tonnes of traffic or perhaps a blog you wrote once about the industrial market is performing really well and driving organic site visits. You can also see how long visitors stayed on your website for or if they bounced straight away.

Another goldmine of data is the Audience section. Look here to see if people use a phone to get on your website, how old they are, male or female, you name it. It’s well worth looking through all of Analytics, as you’ll be surprised at just how much you can find out about your website’s performance.

Persona development

Once you have a solid set of data to refer to, it’s time to develop some personas. A persona is a fictional person that you’d like to target your products or services to, which will help establish a solid framework for your strategy to grow from. Draw up 3 or 4 different target personas and be specific. Include their job title, personal life, characteristics, behavioural style, pain points, income; the more information, the better! This is where Analytics’ Audience data can help, by fleshing out your personas and backing up your own thoughts.

Persona development – even further

With 3 clearly defined people that you would like on your website, it’s time to think about how to speak to and reach these people. For a time-poor Financial Director, for example, it’s likely they’ll want cold hard facts about your products, backed up by financial statistics or case studies to establish trust. Whereas an Operations Manager might be a heavy LinkedIn user with a keen eye for detailed eBooks.

Think about where your personas might access and digest information, whether that’s searching online, browsing their social media feeds or reading online industry journals and emails. If you have a database of clients already, why not send them a survey and get the information straight from the horse’s mouth. Or ask the same job roles within your own company, and base your personas on real-life characteristics.

Channel development

Once you know where your target market resides on the internet, it’s time to research that platform. It might be that there’s one solid channel you want to focus on while you establish your marketing footing. Or you may want to use cross-channel marketing to establish more touch points with your chosen market, but it’s important to always refer back to your end goal.

Search Advertising and Organic Optimisation – SEO & PPC

If you think people are searching for your industrial products or services on Google, then SEO or Google AdWords PPC (Pay-per-Click) is the way to go. Use AdWords Keyword Planner to enter in keywords you’d like to show for, to establish search volumes and estimate cost per clicks. This way, you can see if the search volume is there and if it’s a marketing avenue worth pursuing. If the clicks are cheap, and you have the marketing budget, it’s certainly worth investing in PPC while you grow your organic presence with SEO.

Display Advertising, Shopping & Remarketing

Display advertising allows you to pick websites or target personas to show your adverts to. This is great if you think a large industrial website is the place to get your message to the right people.

If you have an eCommerce website, don’t forget about Google Shopping ads and Dynamic Remarketing. Shopping ads are great to sell a product, and they display an image and information about it before a person has even clicked. This means that every click is one step nearer to a sale. Remarketing will entice previous visitors back to your website, and keep them reminded about your products.

Social PPC Advertising

Is your target market on social media? Then you need to build a presence utilising adverts to boost your following. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all offer advert spaces, and it’s often much cheaper than traditional PPC advertising. Instagram, however, should be left to the more visual products. Facebook advertising offers really granular targeting so you can make the most of your personas. Add all the characteristics you’ve already thought out, such as people interested in Industrial Engineering or Managing Directors within 20 miles of your business. It also enables you to pick a campaign objective from the off, so the adverts are optimised with your end goals in mind.

The Message

Whatever platforms you choose to advertise on, make sure it all ties back to your target persona and your business aims. Having a clear message and tone of voice will help consistency throughout your marketing strategy and increase your brand awareness.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to developing a digital marketing strategy. But with a clear process of how to get there, you can curate a pathway that works for you and your customers. If you’d like more information about developing a digital marketing strategy for your Industrial business, get in touch with SpiderGroup. Our years of experience within the industrial sector enable us to craft tailored strategies that really work. So call us on 0117 933 0570 or fill in our contact form and we’ll get back to you.